


We shall not cease from exploration

by Sophia_Prester



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Being an Artist, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Life After College, Mild Angst, Slice of Life, background zimbits, canon-typical alcohol use, dinosaurs as metaphor, wow there's a lot of self-projection in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 02:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19898284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Prester/pseuds/Sophia_Prester
Summary: Lardo has dreamed of being an artist since she was in kindergarten.It isn't until after college that she starts to understand what that means.





	1. when she was five

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [Lardo Week 2019](https://lardo-week.tumblr.com) and was posted one chapter at a time over on my Tumblr for each day of the challenge. I wrote and posted each chapter the day it was due as a challenge to myself. This version has been lightly edited for a few typos (the sort of things spell-check won't catch) and clarity/sentence structure.
> 
> As usual, thanks to Aishuu for her input and cheerleading along the way! Also, many thanks to the mods of this year's Lardo Week for organizing the challenge.

When she was four, Larissa told anyone who would listen that she was going to be a pa-le-on-to-lo-gist when she grew up.

She always pronounced the word carefully, one precise syllable after another in the right order, but it didn't do her any good.

She had only said 'pa-lo-to-no-to-gist' _one time_ , but every time an auntie or uncle asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, her parents would tell them about her mistake and everyone would laugh about how cute she was.

When she was four, Larissa decided she hated being called cute almost as much as she loved dinosaurs.

How much did she love dinosaurs?

She loved dinosaurs _almost_ as much as she loved her bà ngoại.

In truth, the two were inseparable in her mind. Bà ngoại's condo was where she could watch the Land Before Time movies as many times as she wanted with no one asking if she wanted to watch something else, _please tell me you want to watch something else, how about Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, sweetie? Please?_

When she was four, Larissa also began cultivating the 'unimpressed' look that would serve her so well in the future.

Bà ngoại's condo was also where the big box of toy dinosaurs lived. It didn't matter that some of them were small and cheap and others looked like baby toys and others were so detailed they looked alive. It didn't matter that the plush stegosaurus was five times bigger than the red plastic tyrannosaurus with the bent leg.

All that mattered was the epic journeys and battles she acted out on the living room carpet (or on the couch, which made a _great_ cliff whenever someone needed to fall to their death).

Later, she would realize there were other things that mattered. It mattered that bà ngoại never told her that the stories she made up were stupid or disturbing or wrong. Or that she shouldn't play with "boy's toys." Or ask her over and over and over if maybe she would rather be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher when she grew up.

When she was four, Larissa decided that lawyers were stupid. True, she didn't know what lawyers were, but she did know that they were stupid. Totally stupid.

(Her opinions on doctors and teachers weren't much better.)

She was going to be a pa-le-on-to-lo-gist when she grew up, and that was that. She couldn't imagine loving anything as much as she loved dinosaurs.

When Larissa was five, she started kindergarten.

One day, when the teacher asked everyone in the class to draw their favorite animal, Larissa immediately started drawing a triceratops. If she had been asked a week earlier, she would have drawn a tyrannosaurus. A week later, it would have been a hadrosaurus. But that week the triceratops was her favorite, so a triceratops was what she drew.

Her drawing filled the page. Much, much later, she would look at it and cringe at how the four legs were lined up like fence posts, or how the head was almost the same size of the body. But she also remembered how it felt both bubbly and calm to draw the thick outline, making sure the beast filled the paper from edge to edge.

She remembered how it felt to fill in the outline with broad stripes and big dots of pink, yellow, and orange, getting lost in the back-and-forth of marker on paper.

_And_ how it felt to tell stupid Chad that since no one knew what color triceratops really was, she could make hers any color she wanted and no one could tell her she was wrong.

When Larissa was five, she learned that the only thing better than learning about dinosaurs or playing with toy dinosaurs was _drawing_ dinosaurs.

Most of the time, Larissa gave her drawings to her parents. The drawings would be posted on the fridge for a little while, and then one day they would just be gone.

Something told her that maybe she should give _this_ drawing to her bà ngoại.

When bà ngoại told Larissa that the drawing was the most amazing thing she had ever seen, Larissa believed her.

And when she went to bà ngoại's condo a few weeks later, her picture wasn't stuck to the fridge with shopping lists and reminder notices covering it. Her drawing was on the wall next to the kitchen, in an _actual frame_.

Seeing her drawing there was better than dinosaurs. A _million_ _times_ better than dinosaurs. If you asked her why it was better, she couldn't tell you. Not because she didn't know, but because there were so many answers, she wasn't sure which one was the right one.

Sometimes, it was because she could draw Sailor Moon and her dinosaur army beating up the bad guys.

Sometimes, it was because when she drew, the only thing that mattered was the pen or brush or crayon in her hand, and the way the color followed the path of her hand across the paper.

Sometimes, it was because of the look on her bà ngoại or her mom or her dad gave her when she showed them one of her drawings.

More than those, it was the times when what she saw on the page came close to what she saw on the page.

Yes, she still loved dinosaurs, but she no longer wanted to be a paleontologist.

When she was five, Larissa told anyone who would listen that she was going to be an artist when she grew up.

(She didn't mispronounce anything, but people still laughed and asked her if maybe she would rather be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher instead.)


	2. happy accidents

One of Larissa's very first studio assignments at Samwell didn't actually take place in the studio. To fulfill the assignment, they had to go to a sports practice and fill a number of sketchbook pages with gesture drawings of athletes in motion.

As an assignment, it was a darned good one that she normally would have enjoyed. The only problem was that Boston was in the middle of a heat wave and even teams that had practice at ass-o-clock in the morning would be sweating through their jocks and/or sports bras in five seconds flat.

In short, yuck.

(Also, Lardo had already learned the hard way that charcoal and copious amounts of sweat were not mixy things.)

She skimmed through the athletic calendar looking for something like 'competitive air-conditioned yoga' but figured in the end that ice hockey—emphasis on the _ice_ —was her best bet.

If it hadn't been for her phone's battery conking out in the middle of the night and killing her alarm, she would have gone to the women's practice at o' dark early. As it was, she got to Faber after the men's team had already taken to the ice.

She got a few curious glances from the players, but their captain (she assumed it was the captain) barked at them to pay attention to the ice, not the stands. One of the coaches nodded at her sketchbook and asked, "Professor Davila's life drawing class?" without expecting an answer.

It wasn't until she actually started drawing that Larissa realized why she was the only member of her class who had taken advantage of the cool of the rink. Yes, she had heard of the hockey team's general loudness and obnoxiousness, but that wasn't the problem. The shouts and insults ('chirps,' she would later learn) were a comfortable part of the background along with the _swish-swish-swish_ of the skates and the clatter of the sticks.

The problem was more fundamental than that, and brought with it an echo of her mother's protests of _you need to focus on what's practical, sweetie. You need to set yourself up for a successful life._

Practical would mean living with her parents and taking the T to school every day. Practical would mean constant, well-meaning, 'we just want the best for you' commentary on her choice of studies.

Well, fuck practical. And what did it mean to be successful, anyway?

A small, exhausted part of her said that successful people didn't have to work at one of the campus dining halls to make up for what a partial scholarship and modest college fund wouldn't cover.

And drawing hockey players wasn't the most _practical_ way to _succeed_ at this particular assignment.

Larissa was debating whether or not she should just give up and join the majority of her class at the soccer fields when someone scraped to a halt right in front of where she was sitting.

Whoever it was had better not ask her to 'draw him like one of your French girls,' or he would need a gastroenterologist to remove his hockey stick from his ass.

"What?" she snarled.

The player wasn't anyone Larissa had met before. She would have recognized that mustache for sure. His eyes were wide and he held his stick in front of him in both hands like a talisman.

"Wow," mustache-guy said. "I was going to tell you to try to capture my left side, because that's the best angle if you want to do a portrait of me, but _damn_ if that isn't the single scariest death glare I have seen in my life! Jack! C'mere! You gotta see this death glare!"

The captain skated over, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. "Leave the nice artist alone, Shits." He turned to Larissa. "I apologize. In advance. For everything."

He grabbed mustache-guy by the back of the jersey and skated off with him in tow.

Mustache-guy flailed and squirmed, but not to the point of effective resistance. "Jaaaaaack! You need to stop and talk to the scary lady! That death glare! Put her on D, and we'll have Brown shaking in their skates!"

The captain (Jack?) mouthed a silent 'sorry!' at her before turning his attention back to practice. 

She had just made up her mind to go draw soccer players for the rest of her assignment when the practice finally ended. She flipped through her sketches and was pleasantly surprised to find that she had nearly two-thirds of what was required.

She was less pleasantly surprised when mustache-guy scraped to a stop in front of her again.

"Um, I know this is really fucking forward of me, and you are totally free to say no—and wow, it's kind of fucked up that I even have to say that, isn't it?—but anyway..."

Oh, god. He was going to ask her out, wasn't he?

"I absolutely get it if you don't want to, completely one-hundred-percent get it, but could I see what you've been drawing?"

Lardo could only stare for a moment. "It's just gesture drawings," she blurted out even as she shoved the sketchbook at him.

"Gesture drawings?" He pulled off one of his gloves with his teeth so he could turn the pages. She could see how he looked at each little sketch in turn, not just skimming, but looking.

"Yeah. We're supposed to focus on capturing how the human form looks in motion."

The figures were roughly blocked out, with the occasional thick and swooping line showing the curve of a spine or sweep of a leg.

"These are really neat," he said after a while. "I mean, they're kind of scribbly in parts, but you can really see what's happening. Hell, I can even tell who some of these guys are!"

'Jack' was a tall, solid figure with classical proportions. "You can see how this fucker just moves with power! Ah! Adonis made manifest on earth! And that's Johnson if I ever saw him," he said, pointing at a mess of foreshortening.

That was the goalie, captured as he dropped to block a puck, practically folding himself into something out of an Escher drawing in the process.

"Rans and Holster," he said, pointing at a tangle of overlapping forms that were still two separate people even though they occupied the same space.

He turned to look through the pictures again, which was more flattering than Larissa would ever admit to anyone, while most of the other players headed towards the locker room.

"Thanks," she said. "I'm glad to hear that they work. I was beginning to think that coming here was a mistake."

The betrayed look on his face would have been hilarious if it wasn't so heartbreaking. "Mistake? No! There are no mistakes! Only happy accidents!"

Larissa laughed. "Did you just quote Bob Ross at me?"

"Please don't tell me you're one of those snobby art students who–"

"Bob Ross is awesome the way Mr. Rogers is awesome," she said plainly. "I'm not into his actual paintings, but you gotta love the way he loves what he does."

"Amen," mustache-guy said, sounding more serious than she would have expected. He was looking at his captain—Jack—as he said it.

(It was only after Larissa became Lardo that she would understand even half of what was going on with that look and everything behind it.)

"So why were you worried coming here was a mistake? Please tell me that none of the guys were douchewaffles! I know we're loud, but it's not like we're the lacrosse team!"

"Ha! No, Professor Davila warned us away from them. What threw me were the pads. They make it hard to see what's actually going on, anatomy-wise."

She almost regretted that the instant she said it, because she could imagine all the lewd comments she had just set herself up for.

That didn't happen. All that happened was that Mustache-guy nodded solemnly and Captain Jack glanced over to make sure he didn't need to come over and apologize for something.

"I see," he said. "It must be like trying to draw the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man."

"Close enough." She didn't laugh, but she did let a hint of a smile show through the unimpressed look. He had earned that much.

"By the way, you can call me Shitty. That's not my real name, but my real name's actually worse."

Worse? _How?_

"Hey! Shits!" Jack called out. "Ask her if she's interested in the team manager job!"

"Team manager? Like managing your team? The hockey team?" she asked Shitty. Strangely, the name fit him, but not in a bad way.

Shitty nodded.

God, it would be lovely not to deal with vats of industrial salad dressing anymore. But...

"I don't know how to skate!" she shouted at Jack.

Jack stared at her as if she had just sprouted two extra heads and a tail.

Shitty cackled, and Johnson, who had been hanging around doing not much of anything, muttered something about not being needed after all and left the rink.

Shitty wiped away tears of laughter. "Aw... I think you broke Jack's poor, Canadian brain. Anyhow, skating isn't needed for the job. Dealing with stinky hockey equipment, on the other hand, is."

She shrugged. "It can't be worse than what I smell like after working the deep-fryer all afternoon. What's the pay like?" she asked, because being practical did have its time and place.

The pay wasn't much, but it was better than what the dining hall offered.

"Well, I'd say this was a successful drawing session," she said as they exchanged fist-bumps.

"Here's to happy accidents!"


	3. calendar girl

Something happened to time when Lardo was eighteen. It started moving faster... sort of. Individual days still went by at any pace from a dead crawl to the blink of an eye, but whenever she looked at an actual calendar, she envisioned a cartoon version of herself frantically trying to hold/glue/nail the pages in place so they stopped flying off.

When she was six years old, and her mom told her there were two more weeks until Christmas, it sounded like for _ever._

At eighteen, when she checked and saw there were only two weeks left before finals, it _holyshitjesusfuck??_

She blinked and it was almost time to pack up her dorm room for the summer. She blinked again, and her semester abroad at Kenyatta University went from something she was looking forward to in a vague way to _holyshitjesusfuck??_

And then when she went to Kenya, it felt like she had been there forever until it was almost over and then it was all gone in—you guessed it—a blink.

It was just part of growing older, she supposed. Normally, it didn't bother her, watching dates on the calendar race towards her faster and faster.

But the end of junior year was now approaching _holyshitjesusfuck_ territory. The junior art show had gone from a far off ball of dread to watching Bitty nag Chowder into putting on a jacket.

And then Shitty got into Harvard.

"I feel like such an idiot," she told Bitty the next night. They were up in his room in the Haus, and she had a feeling she was going to end up crashing there. "It's not like I didn't know he had applied, you know? And there I go, acting like it's the end of the world."

"Well, it kinda is, y'know? Next year, it'll be different people across the hall." Bitty jerked his thumb more towards the window than towards Shitty and Jack's rooms, but the meaning was clear.

"Lalalala I don't hear you!"

That got him laughing a little, but she had seen the wistful looks Bitty kept giving Jack. At least she knew Shits would still be local. Jack could end up all the way out on the other coast, for all they knew.

(Still, she was holding out hope he would sign with the Bruins or the Falconers.)

"It's hard to believe I've only got one more year after this. Does it ever seem to you like time just goes zoom sometimes and you're wondering where the hell it went?" She reached over to the stack of pillows next to her and raised an eyebrow at Bitty. When he nodded his permission, she gently pulled his stuffed bunny rabbit into her lap.

"All the time," Bitty said. "Lord, it's hard to believe I'm just about halfway through college. It feels like just yesterday I was half-convinced I was trapped in high-school forever, and now I'm supposed to declare my major in the next two weeks? That's just seventeen kinds of crazy!"

"Yeah." She played with the rabbit's ears, lifting them up and down as if trying to pick up the right frequency. If she had Duckie here, she'd be hugging him tight, no matter that Bitty was there to see.

Part of her wished that she had brought Mr. Steggy to Samwell with her, and she also wished she could remember how and when and why ducks eclipsed dinosaurs as her personal mascot.

"Okay, dude, I'm totally changing the subject, but what did you think of the art show?"

Bitty tipped his head back and gazed at the ceiling as he gathered his answer. She liked that he didn't just come out with sugary reassurances or canned compliments. "To be honest, I don't think I got a lot of it? I mean, there were some pieces I liked, like that felt wall thing your friend Tonya did, but I'm not sure I liked them for what y'all would think were the right reason, if that makes sense?"

Tonya's wall hanging was one of the few pieces at the show that someone had bought. Lardo did sell one of her paintings, but she had a dire suspicion that Jack had bought it.

Shitty would know better.

"It makes sense." They were both quiet for a while. For someone who usually liked to fill silences with noise, Bitty had a good sense for when not to say anything. "You've talked about opening a bakery one day. Do you ever wonder if that's what you should be doing? Forget wanting."

"It'd be a risk, that's for sure. There's no guarantee I'd make any money at it, y'know?"

"Mmm." Lardo hugged the rabbit close, caging it between her torso and her knees. For some reason, she wondered if Duckie felt jealous. Or if Mr. Steggy felt abandoned.

It was stupid, but it made her want to cry. It made her want to cry the way Shitty leaving made her want to cry, or the idea of not being an artist when she grew up (or was she already grown up?) made her want to cry.

But she wasn't going to let herself cry. Even if Bitty was one of the people who would one hundred percent get it.

"Can we just pretend for a little while that all of this is forever?" She waved one arm in a circle that encompassed more things than she could say. This moment. This room. Shitty. Jack. Days spent working on her art and only on her art. Faber. Samwell. Ransom&Holster. Junior year. A calendar that stayed on the same date, pages staying right where they were.

"We can do that," Bitty said softly and yeah, he did get it. "So, do you want to hang out here, or do you want to go down to the kitchen and I can whip us up some date-nut bars?"

"Oooh. I vote for that."

Bitty slapped his knees and stood up. "It's a date."

"A date-nut date!"

Laughing, they headed downstairs, and for a little while, time stood still.


	4. preserves

Her senior thesis and senior project were both done and submitted, and all Lardo had left to do was help prepare for the year-end banquet and suffer through finals.

No, that wasn't entirely true. There were a lot of other things to do, but she was choosing to ignore them.

And speaking of choosing to ignore things...

Lardo switched out her graphite pencil for a handful of pastel pencils in a limited palette of warm jewel tones (plus a pop of almost-white blue) and begin laying down swaths of color.

She had already decided to title this particular piece _Still Life With a Fuckton of Jam._ The way the light gleamed off Bitty's stacks of mason jars and made the deep reds-purples-oranges glow like a sunset was just too damned good an opportunity to pass up.

It was gorgeous, but it was also so very _Bitty_. Lardo hoped that one day, maybe years and years from now, she would look at this and remember what it was like to sit in this kitchen, what it was like to hear Bitty's voice and the creak of the decrepit old Haus.

Or, would she wonder why she had thought it was a good idea to do a study of an overabundance of preserves?

No, she decided. She would not only remember this moment, she would show the damned drawing to Bitty and ask him if _he_ remembered this moment. Even if she had to hunt him down in the middle of Siberia or something.

Would she still be doing her art then? A year ago, the thought would have seemed heretical. Now, though, with no job on the horizon and no money left in her education fund if she did decide to go for her MFA, she couldn't help but wonder about the grim—though faint—possibility.

She was fairly sure she wouldn't let it go completely. White space and margins weren't safe around her when she had a pen or pencil—and she _always_ had a pen or pencil.

The margins of her job-hunting notebook were filled with little dinosaurs. Why dinosaurs, she couldn't say, but there was an array of the little guys marching around the edges of the page. Some were stylized, others realistic, and others in a cartoony style she sometimes like to play with.

God, she hoped she figured out the job thing soon. 

And the housing thing.

And the life-after-school thing.

Bitty made hundreds of jars of jam in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. Lardo drew them.

Like peas in a pod, they were.

She got so lost in her process that she almost forgot that she had to meet with Coach Hall about the year-end banquet.

The meeting wouldn't go long. The logistics of the banquet were a nothing, really. It was the sort of thing she could do in her sleep (or while working on an art project), but everyone always acted like she had pulled a miracle out of her ass.

She just hoped that Hall didn't mind the flustered duckling she had sketched in the bottom corner of the sample menu.

He didn't, if the flicker of a smile was anything to go by.

"That reminds me—there's something I've been meaning to show you."

He got up and walked over to the bookshelf that was on the wall behind her. "I hope you don't mind that I, um, appropriated this. I finally got around to getting it framed a month or so ago."

He handed her the frame. It wasn't a photo. It was the roster from last year's trip to the Frozen Four.

She remembered, now, how he had asked for it before she had a chance to pitch it. She figured he had wanted it as a memento of getting as far as they had, but now that she saw it, she understood why he wanted to keep it.

Like nearly every other piece of paper that had ever crossed her path, the margins were crammed with doodles and sketches.

There was Bitty, or rather, a quick motion study that she recognized as Bitty even without facial features. She recognized it the way she could recognize him on the dance floor even in dim light and when she was thoroughly baked.

Jack was more obvious, even though it was all shading with little detail, calling out his features in the line of his jaw, and the shadows around his eyes and under his cheekbones.

Ransom and Holster and Ollie and Wicky were a little cartoon procession along the bottom of the page. Lardo couldn't read her own handwriting in the captions, but she remembered the fart jokes. _Oh_ , how she remembered the fart jokes...

Nursey and Dex were an incomplete study she had started of them standing next to each other. Only a few details were called out here and there, with no particular logic other than what had caught her eye at the moment. Looking at it now, she remembered how she had liked the feel of the pencil on paper as shaded in a bit of Nursey's hairline.

And then there was Shitty. It was a quick, lively sketch with a few sure lines capturing the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, and the way one corner of his mouth lifted a little more than the other, and...

She remembered looking at Jack's senior photography project _after_ she had learned about him and Bitty being together, and wondering how the hell she could have missed it.

Looking at this picture, she wondered how the hell she could have missed what was going on with her and Shitty. Looking at the sketch now, she remembered the fondness and frustration and sheer pig-headed denial she felt at the time.

She remembered a time earlier than that, when he announced he got into Harvard and she had to leave the room in tears. She remembered him coming up with a 'proper hockey nickname' for her, a name that she slipped into as if it had been sitting there waiting for her since the day she was born.

"It's cool. I don't mind." She handed the picture back to Hall. If she _had_ minded, she knew he would have been decent about it. But why should she mind? "It's flattering, y'know?"

"And one day, I'll be able to say that I have an original Duan in my office," he said lightly. She got what he meant by it, but the comment sat just a little off-kilter. "Not that I'd ever sell it, even for a million dollars."

That helped. In the end, the compliment settled well enough.

They got through the last of the banquet details quickly enough, and Lardo headed back to the Haus, the framed picture still on her mind.

In a way, it should have bothered her, that he would keep a stupid bunch of doodles on a team roster. And some of the doodles were, well, _not great_. Dex's head was too narrow, Jack had a coffee stain, and Bitty's legs were different lengths. There was even a phone number scrawled in the top corner that she thought might have been for a pizza place.

But she _remembered_.

She remembered a drawing she did when she was... five? Six? It was a childish drawing, but she remembered being so proud of it at the time. She also remembered how when she was in her early teens (and _wow_ , there wasn't enough money in the world to convince her to re-live those years) she had been _mortified_ that her bà ngoại had not only framed it but still had it hanging in her living room.

Bà ngoại probably didn't even know the difference between a triceratops and an ankylosaurus, but she loved her granddaughter, and she loved how much her granddaughter loved dinosaurs.

So, yeah. Hall keeping those stupid doodles was pretty damned 'swawesome, actually.

When she got back to the Haus, she checked the angle of the light against the kitchen window and nodded in satisfaction. Even if Bitty had rearranged things, she could still get a good enough read on the colors to finish up _Still Life With a Fuckton of Jam._

Maybe, she thought, she should give the drawing to Bitty when she was done.

She had a feeling he would appreciate it.


	5. conversations in silence

If anything, Jack's playoffs run felt like an extension of their time at Samwell. There weren't any classes or exams, but the core of the SMH crew was still together and being loud the way only they could be.

And when Jack won the Cup, it was like the kegster to end all kegsters. Plus, you know, all the drama about him coming out in the most over-the-top way possible.

"Only you, Jack," she told him, rolling her eyes and sighing. They had grabbed a moment of peace out on his balcony while the others recovered from their post-parade hangovers.

He laughed the way he usually did: two flat, awkward syllables.

"Worth it," he said, sing-song.

This was followed by the kind of quiet she knew better than to interrupt. That was one of the reasons the two of them were such good friends—they understood that silence was its own kind of speech.

(And how ironic was it that both of them had ended up with people who could be so fucking _loud_?)

Jack leaned on the railing, not looking at her or at anything in particular.

"Six years ago, if you told me I wouldn't win my first Cup until I was almost twenty-five..." He shook his head. "By the time my father was twenty-two, he had won _four_ Cups with the Habs. Boom-boom-boom-boom, four wins in a row right out of the gate."

"Huh."

"Exactly."

She thought it over for a moment. "Well, your dad _is_ kind of extra, y'know?"

The sharp bark of startled laughter was nothing like his usual _haha._

"Oh, boy. Yeah, he really is. He really, _really_ is." Another quiet laugh, and he fell back into silence for a little while before speaking again. "I hate when commentators say that the last several years were a 'waste.' They weren't."

Again, Lardo said nothing, because what Jack wasn't saying was so damned obvious. If he had gone into the NHL back in 2009, things would be so different for him, and not necessarily a better kind of different.

"I think some of my favorite memories of Samwell—other than the ones about Bits, of course—are from when I was working on my thesis."

"Freak."

He gave her a gentle hip check. A friendly one, not the kind that could send a defenseman into the boards. "You know what I mean. Anyhow, I don't know if I ever thanked you enough for letting me hide in your studio while I was finishing it up."

She didn't know if he had actually said it, or if it was one of those things that was just known in silence. That was what she remembered about those times when he came to her studio. The silence.

It was so quiet she could hear the scrape of her brush on canvas as she finished the last piece for her Junior Show, and the _taka-taka-taka_ of Jack typing away on his laptop. The other art students knew better than to bother her, and none of Jack's fans and no wanna-be puck bunnies would think to look for him in Koetter.

She didn't often like to paint in front of other people.

Shitty was an exception, because he was _Shitty_ , not that she knew what that meant until much too recently.

Jack was another exception, because when he did choose to watch instead of write, he got just as lost in the process as she did. He also had a decent eye for composition (but _not_ for color, oh _hell_ no), and was as good at giving feedback when she asked for it as he was at taking the feedback she gave him on his photos.

"I think that's why I bought that painting at your Junior show."

Oh, God. The painting. She always had to force herself not to cringe whenever she saw it in his living room.

"Whenever I look at it, I remember watching you paint it." A long pause. "I mean, it was neat, seeing that. How you worked."

Oh.

They came back to her in a flash, those afternoons at Koetter. The silky slide of paint as she laid glazes of blue upon blue upon blue on a canvas that was as wide as she was tall. The soft scratching when she did dry-brush and palette knife work. The never-ending but oh-so-satisfying tweaking and adjusting of light and shape in her abstract sky-scape and then having to tweak another section of canvas, because if you changed one thing in a painting, everything else changed in response.

Losing time and self and worry in the flow of creativity and the contentment of simple companionship.

"It makes me happy, having it. You know?"

"Don't you dare make me cry, Zimmermann. Don't you fucking dare!"

He chuckled as she elbowed him in the ribs, and he pulled her into a hug.

Jack-hugs were the best. They felt super-solid and super-safe.

"No crying," he ordered, giving her a little shake.

She felt like shit for assuming that he had made a pity-purchase. Well, she knew better now.

She cleared her throat and pulled away. "Well, not only were the last few years super _not_ a waste, you also got a Cup before Ovechkin did, so yay."

Jack laughed so hard, she was half-worried he was going to give himself a hernia or something.

"I _dare_ you to say that at your next presser," she taunted.

"Ha ha. No. I don't want to be stabbed with a skate blade the next time we play the Caps."

"Eh, whatever."

They returned to their comfortable silence, looking out over the Providence skyline. She heard the noises of grumpy awakening from behind them in the apartment. Loud and dramatic disgruntlement from Holster, which was rivaled by Tater's Slavic plaints of grievous injury and dire lack of pie. She heard Bitty's gentle scolding, and Ransom's extravagant yawns which she recognized after four years of roadies.

She let her thoughts wander where they would, and a realization slowly took shape. It was a gentle and completely unremarkable sort of epiphany, gradual like the layering of color on color on color.

Jack hadn't wasted the last five or six years, even if other people said he had or for a little while _he_ believed he had.

Ransom hadn't shitcanned his plans of becoming a doctor, no matter what his family apparently thought.

Just because she was out of college didn't mean she had to go right into being a struggling artist or give up and sell her soul to the corporate overlords and do something _practical_.

Jack had still played hockey during those 'wasted' years, and had done a lot of things that _weren't_ hockey. Just the other day, she and Ransom had talked about how taking a year or two off before med school would not only help him save up some money, there were a lot of ways it might make him a better doctor in the end.

Basically, what she realized was this: she had time. Time to figure things out. Time to maybe try a few new things. Experiment. Learn.

Time to enjoy living with the boys and hanging out with Jack and Bitty.

Time to just fucking _breathe_ for the first time since her last semester started in January.

Delay was not the same thing as failure. She supposed she had known that before, but that wasn't the same as _knowing_ it.

Yeah, the idea of failing to make it as an artist was still scary as hell, but at least the idea no longer had a countdown clock and a detonator strapped to its chest.

"Feeling better?" Jack asked, hearing everything she had not been saying over the past few months.

Another moment of quiet, and then:

"Yeah. I am."


	6. the practical thing to do

It wasn't that Lardo _wasn't_ earning money. She had two decent part-time jobs and had even picked up a couple of freelance assignments here and there.

One of the freelance assignments (painting the risers of a staircase in an old house-turned-bookstore to resemble shelves of children's books) had been fun and had paid fairly well, but it hadn't led to any nibbles from other potential patrons.

She had time, she reminded herself. There was nothing wrong with working part-time for a gallery and for a local youth hockey organization. There was nothing wrong with creating some stability for herself.

But something _was_ wrong.

"Can I vent?" She had timed her question for when Ransom and Holster were home and Shitty was at an evening seminar. As for She-Who-Would-Not-Be-Named, Lardo didn't really give a shit if she was home or not.

"Lay it on us, so we may ease your troubled mind," Holster intoned, affecting an air of wisdom and concern. Ransom didn't say anything, but he closed his laptop and put it aside so he could pay full attention.

Wanting to vent didn't mean knowing what to say. Instead, she just plopped herself down on the couch right between them. There wasn't _quite_ enough room, but they made it work.

"I feel like a fucking parasite," she said at last.

The cries of _no no no!_ and _we're fine with how things are divvied up, honest!_ weren't as comforting as they were meant to be.

"I'm venting, okay? That means you gotta let me vent! Don't..." She took a deep breath. "Don't just tell me not to worry, a'ight?"

Part of her could hear Shitty explaining how being told not to worry was sometimes the same as 'go away and don't bother me with your pesky emotions,' and _that_ , she found comforting.

"My bad," Holster said.

Ransom pulled her into a side hug. "Sorry about that, Lards. Go ahead. Why are you comparing yourself to a tapeworm?"

"Gross, dude," she and Holster said in perfect unison, and that led to a giggle fit that totally killed the mood.

"Now I'm not feeling ranty. I'm just going to whine instead."

"Would you like some wine with that whine?" Holster asked in a horrible faux-British accent.

"Oh, _hell_ yes."

The occasion apparently called for a bottle of good wine that had been 'liberated' from Shitty's grandparents _and_ the novelty wine glasses. Lardo noted that her glass was the one that said 'Wine is cheaper than therapy' and tried not to read too much into it. After all, Ransom's said 'I just can't adult today' and Holster's glass proclaimed that he was 'Sotally Tober.'

"So anyway, I feel like a total mooch. I know you guys say it doesn't bother you that I'm paying a smaller share of rent than you are, but it still bugs me. I feel... I feel _kept_."

"Does it help if we tell you we don't think of it that way at all?" Ransom asked gently.

She shrugged. "In theory."

Shitty, Ransom, and Holster had each told her over and over and over they didn't mind paying bigger shares of the rent. They all either had or made enough money to cover it, and how the hell was Lardo supposed to do art on the side if she didn't have the time or energy to do art?

"We've got your back, bro," Holster said as if that explained everything.

She knew it should. She wished it did.

"Did anything in particular stir this up?" Ransom asked. His eyes narrowed. "Shitty's dad didn't say anything again, did he? Or Claire?"

Holster shushed him and cast furtive looks at the hallway. "Don't say her name! She'll know we're talking about her!"

Ransom leaned in close and lowered his voice to a whisper. "I know I always said I was Team Attic, but if the person who was hiding in the attic turned out to be you-know-who? Then fuck it. I'm changing my answer."

"Dude," Holster said solemnly. "What if she's actually a thousand roaches in a trench coat?"

"Huh. That actually makes a lot of sense."

Watching their familiar back and forth helped more than their concern.

"No one said anything, guys." Well, George had said something in an email, but not in the way the guys meant it. "Just some job stuff came up today that... well, it stirred some shit up."

The point of having a job was to earn a living. Yes, you should do something you liked to do, but you needed to be _practical_ about it. Lardo's parents had never been poor, but for as long as she could remember, they always had to be mindful. She had never gone hungry, but her mother and her bà ngoại had, once upon a time.

They had always encouraged and celebrated her artwork, but they had also been very clear that she was expected to get a _real_ job.

There had also been sly hints about how finding a _husband_ with a real job was a possible alternative, but she forced the thought from her mind because while a wine hangover was bad, a rage hangover was even worse.

The three of them talked and talked and killed off a bottle and a half of wine. It was weaksauce compared to their kegster days, but while Lardo had gone to several classes hungover and still in her pajamas, she didn't think that would fly at the Newbury Street gallery where she worked.

Where she worked for now, at least.

"I'm done guys," she said with a yawn that was only a little exaggerated. "Thanks for letting me dump on you. And don't say it's no problem or anything stupid like that."

She really hoped Shitty got home soon. Now that she had vented, she actually wanted to _talk_.

It was good to crawl into bed. It was only half-made, as usual, but Duckie and Mr. Steggy were in their proper places as they should be. She smiled, remembering how Shitty had literally squeed with delight when she first introduced him to her childhood plushie.

She hugged both stuffed animals to her and fell asleep.

She was woken up what felt like just a minute later when a naked Shitty tried to pry Mr. Steggy out of her grasp.

"You're hogging the cuddle-buddies," he whispered.

"You snooze, you lose."

"Excuse you, but _I_ was not the one snoozing, Ms. Duan."

She laughed and let Shitty take the plush stegosaurus. He slid into bed and snuggled close. She leaned in and kissed him deep, curling one hand around the back of his head so she could play with his hair. God, she was glad he was growing it out again.

He ran his fingers down the curve of her waist and up the rise of her hip, but it was a question more than a request. She kissed him again, then pulled back. "Just this," she said. "And can I talk to you about something?"

She felt him tense defensively but then relax. The first had been automatic, the second, deliberate.

"Okay?"

"First of all, yes, there is some money shit tied up in all of this, so I need to know we're okay talking about money. Otherwise, this is going to be frustrating as hell."

It said something that all he did was nod in agreement. They had figured out quickly that the differences in their backgrounds made financial discussions a big-ass mine field. They'd had a rough start, but now they used their safe words more when talking about money than they did when having sex.

Lardo thought more couples should follow their example.

"I got a solid lead on a new job today."

His face lit up. "What! That's–"

She covered his mouth with her hand. "Let me finish. And if you lick my hand, I will pluck your mustache out hair by hair. Nod if you understand."

He nodded. She removed her hand.

"Here's the problem. If I take this job, I'll have to quit the gallery job and cut back my time with the Rockets. Maybe even quit."

"Okay..." he said. She could tell he had a question, but was holding it. For now.

"Starting out, it would mean less money, if I had to quit _both_ jobs. Not much less, but..." But it had been enough to trigger an emotional crisis that required copious amounts of wine to solve. " _And_ the commute would suck."

"Okay."

She knew he wanted to say he would fix it, that he would make up the difference. She could _see_ it. But he stayed quiet, and she loved him all the more for it.

"But the pay cut would only be at first. A lot of what I'd be doing is training to take on someone else's job when he retires next year. And it would be decent money. I..."

She let go.

"I thought that wasn't important to me! I _know_ I'm worth more than the money I make! I know my art is damned good art even if it takes me forever to get to where I can do it full time! So what's wrong with me that I'm ready to throw away an art gallery job—a fucking _Newbury Street_ gallery job!—just so I can make more money a whole year from now!"

Shitty actually raised his hand sheepishly, as if he was a student in her class. "Um, so what is this job, anyway?"

That was enough to get her to laugh, and laughing gave her an excuse to wipe away the tears that had started to well. Just because she loved Shitty didn't mean she liked crying in front of him. "Details, details... Yeah. George Martin emailed and said she's got an opening for an assistant equipment manager-slash-logistics person."

"George Martin? As in Jack's George? Falcs George?" Shitty's eyes were wide. "Holy guacamole doesn't even _begin_ to cover it! So, what are you thinking?"

"In a lot of ways, it makes sense to keep the gallery job. No, it's not my kind of art." Honestly, it was more the sort of thing she imagined hanging in Shitty's grandparent's house. "But it's good experience to see what the business side of things is like for when I start selling my own things. And then there's the networking. It would be the practical thing to–"

She stopped, listening to what she was about to say and hearing the words in her mother's voice.

"Lards?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you still have time to do your art?"

She shrugged. "Yeah. I don't see why not."

Shitty reached out and took her hand. He rubbed his thumb up and down her wrist, stroking and soothing. "When you said you would have to quit your gallery job and maybe not work as much with the kiddos on the Rockets, I almost said something."

She nodded. She had caught that.

"What I almost said was that you sounded way more upset about cutting back your work with the kids than you did about quitting the gallery completely."

"Holy shit," she whispered. It was as if someone had pulled aside the curtain hiding Oz the Great and Terrible.

She didn't like the gallery. She liked the _idea_ of the gallery. She liked that even after she had decided that the world wouldn't end if she didn't get a job in the arts right away, the opportunity was dropped in her lap. She liked how it had felt like a sign or portent. She liked what she had been learning from her boss and the new appreciation she had for mid-century American art.

What she didn't like was dressing up like she worked in a law office. She didn't like the way some buyers treated paintings like investment properties. She didn't like being a salesperson/hostess.

And she really didn't like how many clients reminded her of Shitty's grandparents.

And she _loved_ her hockey kids.

"You're right. But..."

"But?"

She gently plucked Mr. Steggy from Shitty's grasp and set him on the nightstand. Duckie followed a second later, and Lardo wriggled as close to Shitty as she could. "But you've given me a lot to think about." She tilted her head so she could kiss his chin. "G'night."

There was no need to make a decision just then, even though she was pretty sure what it would be. There were a few things she had to think through, first.

She felt like something big had shifted, or was about to shift, and that the future was going to be something she had never imagined. But that was okay.

She had Shitty. And in a different way, she had Ransom and Holster, and Jack and Bitty.

And, as Holster had said, they had her back.


	7. to arrive where we started

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We shall not cease from exploration  
> And the end of all our exploring  
> Will be to arrive where we started  
> And know the place for the first time"  
> –T.S. Eliot

A year after Lardo graduated, her bà ngoại moved into a retirement community. It wasn't quite assisted living, but assistance was available and inevitable.

At first, Lardo's mom looked at it as a failure on her own part. As a dutiful daughter, she should be the one to look after her mother in her old age just as her mother had looked after her during infancy.

Lardo knew all too well what it was like to struggle with the idea that what you thought you should do wasn't always the right thing to do.

Bà ngoại had laughed aside the idea as she patted mom's hand. "We would murder each other, my precious daughter. Besides, I'm going because I want go and I'm going before I _have_ to go. All of my friends are there. I'll be able to play cards every day, if I like."

Oh, yes. _Cards_. Lardo had _seen_ bà ngoại at the card table. Bà ngoại at the card table was like Lardo at the pong table.

It didn't take much imagination to see a younger bà ngoại kicking everyone's asses at flip cup.

Scratch that. It didn't take much imagination to see bà ngoại kicking everyone asses _now_.

"What are you smiling at, child?" Bà ngoại asked with an innocence that fooled absolutely no one.

"The way you're going to totally dominate the canasta table. So, do you need any help moving? I know some big strong guys who owe me a favor or five."

And so it was that all four foot ten of bà ngoại led a procession of current and former hockey players down the halls of the Fern Hill Retirement Community. Lardo wasn't sure what grapevine had been called into play, but all of her bà ngoại's friends had found _some_ reason to pass through that part of the building.

Later, Lardo would swear she saw one woman fan herself like she was Blanche from the Golden Girls.

If the smugness radiating off of bà ngoại could be converted into energy, all of Boston would be shining like the sun.

Bà ngoại had few enough things that none of the guys had to make more than two trips. Ransom and Holster took their leave as soon as they were done, as did Snowy, but from the look of things, Tater had gotten himself adopted by a couple of elderly Russian widows, while Bitty had locked in on the community's most avid bakers as if he were a butter-seeking missile. She wasn't sure where Jack and Shitty had gone off to, but they could look after themselves.

The larger pieces of furniture had been set where they needed to be with little fuss (except for one carved wooden table which had to be set _just so_ ), and all the boxes were placed in the appropriate spots as decreed by Lardo's clipboard.

"Do you need any help unpacking, bà ngoại?"

Bà ngoại waved her off even as she dug into the one box that she had carried herself. "No... actually yes. I would love it if you got my bed made up. I have a few things I need to do before I can call this place home, and then I think I will take a nap."

It didn't take long to find the sheets and make the bad, thanks the clearly labeled boxes. When Lardo returned to the living room, she smiled to see the old photo of her ông ngoại already set up right where it belonged on the carved wooden table, surrounded by the familiar vases, bowls, and incense burner.

But bà ngoại wasn't done with whatever it was she needed to make this place a home. She held a large framed picture to her chest and was clearly deciding between two possible walls.

"There, I think," bà ngoại said, pointing to the wall next to the kitchenette. "Can you help me hang this?"

_This_ was a framed picture of a blobby, spiky animal—supposedly a triceratops—in faded pinks, yellows and oranges. It was an unskilled drawing, but Lardo could see the beginnings of a sense of color, of form, of light.

"Yeah," she said, voice thick. "Let's do this."

There was measuring, and marking, and squabbling, and a couple of bent nails, but eventually the picture was up.

"There. Now this is home," bà ngoại declared. Her late husband's photo and her granddaughter's drawing were both where they should be, and apparently that was all it took.

Lardo hugged her gently, remembering when bà ngoại had been the taller one and she was the smaller one.

Lardo had been Larissa back then, a little girl who had loved dinosaurs almost as much as she loved her bà ngoại.

"Do you remember how you always said you wanted to be a paleontologist when you grew up?"

Lardo _sort of_ remembered that, but what she actually remembered was—

"You always used to get so mad when your parents told people how you used to pronounce it!" bà ngoại said gleefully.

"Arrrgh!" Lardo cringed in embarrassment and tugged at her hair. "They said it was cute! I hate being called cute!"

The way bà ngoại smiled said that she knew damned well just how much Lardo hated it—and found it cute.

"I remember how much you loved making up stories about your toy dinosaurs. Do you still have that big plush one?"

"Mr. Steggy?" She scoffed. "Heck _yeah_ I still have him!"

"Good. I thought it was a little sad when you stopped being so interested in dinosaurs."

"Mr. Steggy is forever. And now I'm into ducks, which are, like, stealth dinosaurs."

She still remembered the little thrill when she learned that dinosaurs were still around in the form of birds.

They hadn't gone extinct.

They just weren't what you expected them to turn out to be. But they were still there.

She hugged her bà ngoại goodbye and went to collect her boys.

The others assumed that her thoughtful mood on the way home was due to the idea of moving her grandmother into a retirement community, but that was only part of it.

She thought about all the times her family asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.

At first, she had wanted to be a paleontologist the way other kids wanted to be astronauts, back when it wasn't the reality of the job you wanted but the cool factor of ACTUAL MONSTERS or SPACESHIPS.

Then, there was the dream of being an artist.

And fuck it, she _was_ an artist! She just also happened to be an equipment manager for a professional hockey team, a job that wasn't in any way, shape, or form on her list of dream jobs at any point _ever_.

But, via a 'happy accident,' George had mentioned something to Thirdy about needing to train up a replacement for Stu, and Thirdy had said something to Marty, and...

And because a previous 'happy accident' had led her to Jack and a job that got her away from that miserable deep-fryer, here she was.

She had taken to the job like a duck-billed dinosaur to water and it hadn't taken long for the team to take to her. Of course it helped that Jack already loved her, Tater already adored her, Snowy already admired her, and Poots already (rightfully) feared her.

She was jolted out of her musings when Jack pulled up in front of Haus 2.0.

"Later, gator?" Shitty asked. Lardo didn't say anything, but gave him a lingering kiss.

With training camp starting up soon, it made more sense to crash with Jack and Bitty for part of the week. In another year, she and Shitty would probably be ready to find a place of their own, so it didn't make sense to move into or out of either place completely.

Jack and Bitty had to go on a grocery run, which Lardo suspected was an excuse to give her some alone time.

Jack was a good bro, really he was.

Lardo let herself into the condo. The picture hanging next to the kitchen pass-through was familiar enough that she didn't usually notice it anymore, but now she stopped to look at it.

Bitty had declared that _Still Life_ _With a Fuckton of Jam_ was one of his favorite graduation presents, and the fact that he hung it by his beloved kitchen said more than a 'thank you' ever could.

She passed by her Junior Show sky-scape as she cut through the living room. She loved that it was owned by someone who saw it being made and who wanted to hang on to the memory of the making of it.

No, this wasn't what she pictured when she thought about being an artist when she grew up, but that dream was still very much alive. Just not in the way she had expected it to be.

It was better. She would never say this out loud, because it would completely nuke her cred, but it was all tangled up in love.

Even when she was doing work for hire, it was still about the people. She still went to the Macey's used bookstore where the steps she had painted enticed young readers up to a nook furnished with cushions and hidey-holes. And every time she saw Lardo, Macey still gushed about how she had wanted a staircase like that in her bookstore ever since she saw one as a child, and now she had the store of her dreams, and wasn't it wonderful?

She was currently halfway through another commission, this one for a friend of Snowy's who needed a re-do on his mask after getting traded to the Aeros. Jukes was super-psyched about the retro-futurist space-themed design she was doing in the Aeros' silver and red. In fact, he was _so_ psyched that Lardo half-suspected kid-Jukes would have said he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up (possibly a hockey-playing astronaut—he _was_ Canadian, after all).

Snowy had taken one look at the design and had declared that by the end of the season, Lardo would have a three year waiting list, and that if he weren't so superstitious about his current mask, he'd be next in line after Jukes.

Having another job (one that she loved) gave her the freedom to pick and choose the art she wanted to do the way she wanted to do it and for the people she wanted to do it for. One day, she might be able to do it full time and she really hoped she would get there.

The important thing was, she was an artist. It was an essential part of who she was and who she would be, just like Bitty didn't need to own a bakery to be a baker.

She flopped down on the bed in Jack's guest room (which was already halfway to being 'her' room). She was exhausted enough to want to nap, but too keyed up to do so.

So, she picked up her bedside sketch pad, flipped to a mostly empty page, and began doodling.

She started with a triceratops.


End file.
